Comment by smugglerFlynn
4 years ago
Just for the record, some of the examples Graeber uses include airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags do not arrive, middle management, and corporate compliance officers.
You can call these jobs “bullshit” if you rely on an oversimplified version of the world where perfect airlines, perfect employees, and automatically enforced laws exist. Unfortunately, that’s also the exact view I often see in tech, where people tend to devalue work of others because its value does not seem to be self-explanatory in the first 60 seconds they spend on analysis of the situation.
In real life your lost baggage experience would suck without the person behind the airline desk, you org won’t be able to scale without middle management, and your business would suffer budget cuts due to legal fines because the only proper way to stay legally compliant today is (surprise!) to hire a compliance officer.
Good luck inventing some imaginary perfect-world systems where those issues do not exist and do not require extra staff you label as “bullshit”. Any kind of system which is designed and managed by people will have flaws and will require extra jobs handling these flaws. These jobs are not bullshit, they are valuable because they allow the system to exist and stay efficient.
> Just for the record, some of the examples Graeber uses include airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags do not arrive, middle management, and corporate compliance officers.
> You can call these jobs “bullshit” if you rely on an oversimplified version of the world where perfect airlines, perfect employees, and automatically enforced laws exist.
You can also do so if, say, you are an anarchist who views capitalism as a system of exploitation and employment in wage labor as a modern form of slavery, which rather invalidates the idea of, rather than assuming the existence of, perfect airlines, perfect employees, or perfectly enforced (corporate) law.
I mention this because...well, you might want to read more of Graeber’s work (or even just more of Bullshit Jobs) to understand why.
David Graeber is an anarchist, his criticism of bullshit jobs is about sustaining the centralisation of power, not techbro idealism.
There is no reason outside of power dynamics why airline desk staff need to exist to comfort disgruntled passengers, because the existence of disgruntled passengers who need to be shooed off is a consequence of the airline industry.
> is a consequence of the airline industry
So then yes you are assuming that anarchism can wave a magic wand and make it so airlines never lose people's bags, or that it won't ever create any extra work to track down those bags.
No, but that airlines hire essentially customer service reps to face the brunt of people's anger while the company changes nothing to prevent the problems is a classic corporate strategy. They exploit customers and neglect their responsibility and then hire some poor mug to get shouted at.
I don't know if that's David Graeber's specific criticism but it is mine.
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Don't assume vested interest, like techbros do. Graeber was an anthropologist, and the book builds on his work more than on his views.
I don't doubt that, but being an anarchist doesn't mean you can't criticise authority from an objective position. If anything, critiquing authority and power might lead you to both write this book, and take an anarchist position.
Noise insulation in the airplane exists because it tries to shield passengers from the aircraft noise, which is a consequence of modern airplane design. Following the same logic, shall we call it bullshit insulation?
This line of thought assumes three bold ideas:
I will now quote Graeber to see what kind of arguments he uses to support these three ideas in his original infamous essay[1].
Re. 1
Re. 2 and 3:
Unfortunately, no solution is discussed at all. Neither there is a validation for this hypothesis to be found anywhere.
I’m sorry, but this line of logic cannot be refuted. Simply because there is no logic, there is an emotionally charged narrative supported by anecdotes and directed at very broad and abstract problem (“ruling class”), with no solution provided by author. Anarchism is assumed to be a solution, but I hope at this point it should be obvious, with the level of problem analysis involved, we could also use a magic wand.
1 - https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/
If his actual argument is "they do it to keep us busy" with no further elaboration, that's just wildly conspiratorial and a pretty stupid argument.
How I'd look at it (as a postmodernist) is like this: after the owning class moved all the "real" (ie, related to manufacturing) work overseas to places where labour is cheap, first world jobs have been increasingly focused on problems within the abstraction itself - we're not dealing with harvesting or processing grain or rolling steel, we're managers of managers of people who generate sales contracts for rolled steel made somewhere in China. Our jobs feel like bullshit because they're entirely removed from material production, and are generally quite "meta". It's a form of labour alienation, which is a consequence of the capitalist division of labour (as compared to the artisan/craft system under feudalism, which people in the West are often seeking to imitate now).
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